Media Architecture Institute

It is with great pleasure to announce that the 2018 Media Architecture Biennale (MAB18) will be held in Beijing, China. MAB18 will be hosted by the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) and the Beijing Visual Arts Innovation Institute (BVAII) in collaboration with the Media Architecture Institute.

MAB18 will again run over four days, from 13-16 November 2018, and include workshops, symposia, industry keynotes, academic talks and an exhibition.

The theme of MAB18 will be “Media Architecture – Digital Infrastructure at the Scale of the Hybrid City”. Media architecture is involved in placemaking and smart city initiatives through infrastructure large and small. While connected information displays and mobile phones might inform tenants about energy efficiency, coordinated large-scale facades and screens can influence the identities of entire cities. How can the various scales that media architecture operates in be connected to support social structures within the territory of a city? The goal of MAB18 is to bring together top researchers, academics, designers, and city builders to investigate the many connected uses and scales of media architecture in their local and global contexts.

The MAB18 website and call for participation will be launched shortly.

Photo: Water Cube, Olympic Park, Beijing by Flickr user inkelv1122

UTV and UNSW Art & Design proudly present the ✗Communicate (Cross Communicate) Symposium and Exhibition as part of the Vivid Ideas program 2015. Curated by Lubi Thomas ✗Communicate will take place at UNSW’s Paddington Campus on Friday 5th June 2015. More detailed information about ✗Communicate and registration links can be found at www.x-communicate.net and www.vividsydney.com

PROJECT SYNOPSIS
✗Communicate is a symposium of shared experiences and aspirations presented by a network of individuals, organisations and research institutes working in an evolving field of community engagement, urban screens and placemaking in the digital age. ✗Communicate will bring together a spectrum of voices from across the local, national and international digital/new media, community engagement and media architecture sectors. Through a structure of interrelated sessions, ✗Communicate proposes to take participants on a journey of conversations that thread together an emerging community, founded on a culture of experimentation, innovation and reflective evaluation.
This symposium discussion is a prelude to a major International Media Architecture Conference on Digital Placemaking and Smart Cities being organised by the Media Architecture Institute and UTV for Vivid 2016 to be hosted at The Concourse in Chatswood. www.mab16.mediaarchitecture.org

SYMPOSIUM FORMAT
The symposium format includes an opening keynote and morning session before breaking for a networking lunch. There are two shorter afternoon sessions followed by a panel discussion. Following the closing session a VIP networking evening event will be held in the UNSW Art & Design courtyard and will include a live VJ performance from our international VJ artist, Christine Coulange, brought to you by Videospread, France. ✗Communicate will also launch the prototype of ‘Discussions in Space (DiS)’, a platform that has been developed for public screens by UTV in collaboration with University of Sydney, UNSW and QUT and funded by The Henry Halloran Trust. The platform offers an interactive, fast-paced social media channel for local governments, organisations or institutions to engage with local residents or visitors in public spaces. ✗Communicate will close with a range of video art works through until 9pm, including a program by French Curator Céline Jouenne from Videospread, student works curated by UNSW TV and a video artwork by Glen Henderson titled “The Lightness Matrix 3 Grande Search”.

Force Field is the dynamic light installation Rogier van der Heide created with his students for the Gallery space Phase 2 in London. The work was developed in collaboration with Arup staff and with students from the University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam. The installation consists of 64 inter-dependent luminous rods forming a wave of changing colour. The installation mimics the forces and energies that flow through a building and acts like a magnetic field. A sensor allows the visitor to change the colour or to scan an Oyster card to create a personalised light show. The result is a compelling walk-through environment of inspring you with 16 million colour variations. (more…)

The workshop on interactive city lighting held at the international conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI) in Paris aims at exploring the topic form various perspectives. The workshop goal is to bring together a community of researchers, designer and practitioners to better understand the capabilities, contexts of use and possibilities for user participation of this emerging technology. Selected contributions will be invited to present and share their approach with the community. The workshop aims to: identify key opportunities for new forms of interactive lighting systems in urban context, explore interaction paradigms that can be (re-) used for interactive urban lighting, and examine adequate ways of prototyping and evaluating interactive lighting systems.

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As one of the major outdoor installations the City Hall Tower was lit up during and after the Media Architecture Biennale 2012 which happened in Aarhus-Denmark.

The project was realized as a cooperation of the MAI and Aarhus Univeristy / PIT / CAVI with generous support trough AHL Mediafacades who were sponsoring the hardware. (more…)